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AGAINST THE CURRENT
The Plastic
Sea
By Captain Paul Watson
On the beach at Malibu, California, Allison Lance walks her dog
every morning. She carries a plastic bag in her hand to carry
the bits and pieces of plastic debris she picks up. Each morning
she fills the bag, but by the next morning there is always another
bag to be filled. Joey Racano does the same in Huntington Beach
further down south. The harvest of plastic waste is never-ending
on both Allison's and Joey's beaches, and practically every beach
around the world is similarly cursed.
We live in a plastic convenience
culture; virtually every human being on this planet uses plastic
materials directly and indirectly every single day. Our babies
begin life on Earth by using some 210 million pounds of plastic
diaper liners each year; we give them plastic milk bottles, plastic
toys, and buy their food in plastic jars, paying with a plastic
credit card. Even avoiding those babies by using contraceptives
results in mass disposal of billions of latex condoms, diaphragms,
and hard plastic birth control pill containers each year.
Every year we eat and drink from
some thirty-four billion newly manufactured bottles and containers.
We patronize fast food restaurants and buy products that consume
another fourteen billion pounds of plastic. In total, our societies
produce an estimated sixty billion tons of plastic material every
year.
Each of us on average uses 190
pounds of plastic annually: bottled water, fast food packaging,
furniture, syringes, computers and computer diskettes, packing
materials, garbage bags and so much more. When you consider that
this plastic does not biodegrade and remains in our ecosystems
permanently, we are looking at an incredibly high volume of accumulated
plastic trash that has been built up since the mid-twentieth
century.
Where does it go? There are only
three places it can go: our earth, our air, and our oceans.
All the plastic that has ever
been produced has been buried in landfills, incinerated, and
dumped into lakes, rivers, and oceans. When incinerated, the
plastics disperse non-biodegradable pollutants, much of which
inevitably find their way into marine ecosystems as microscopic
particles.
Back in 1991, my ship, the Sea
Shepherd , was anchored in the harbor of Port of Spain, Trinidad.
It began to rain a hard steady downpour. A few hours later, the
entire surface area of the harbor was dirty white, as if an ice
floe had entered this tropical port. The "floe" consisted
of Styrofoam, plastic bottles, and assorted plastic materials,
as far as the eye could see, and it had come down from the streets,
gutters, and streams into the harbor. And, of course, it was
all washing out to sea, dispersed by wind and tide.
What happened to it after that?
The sun and the brine broke it down into little pellets of Styrofoam
and little pieces of plastic - each an insidious, floating, deadly
mine set adrift in an ocean of life.
And over the years these little
nodules have drifted. Many have been ingested by birds and fish.
Weeks or months later, their victims decompose on the surface
of the water or on a beach, re-exposing the nodules to the light
of the sun, to be blown by the winds back into the sea. These
vicious little inorganic parasites continue to maim and kill
in an endless assault upon life in our oceans.
The simple fact is that when
you drop a Styrofoam cup onto the street, you're causing more
damage than you would by dropping a stick of dynamite into the
ocean. You set in motion an invasion of thousands of killer plastibots
that will cause death and destruction for centuries to come.
Eighteen billion of those disposable
diapers end up in the oceans each year; Americans alone toss
2.5 million plastic bottles into the sea every hour. Our oceans
are full of floating plastic debris. There is no place in the
oceans where a fine trawl will not reveal plastic nodules. Studies
by Captain Charles Moore and the Algalita Foundation found that
even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, plastic nodules have
been found to outweigh plankton by a ratio of six to one. Similar
studies in the Atlantic have revealed the same ratio.
In the recent movie Castaway,
Tom Hanks, marooned on a desert island in the South Pacific,
finds a plastic siding of a portable outhouse washed up on the
beach. The stuff is everywhere. I have found plastic bottles
with Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and English writing littering
the beaches of even the most remote Aleutian Islands.
And yet we give this global threat
very little thought at all. It is out of the sight of land-dwelling
humanity, and thus out of mind. The only industry that seems
concerned about plastic pollution is the marine insurance business.
The intake of plastics into the cooling systems of engines is
one of the leading causes of maritime engine failures. Last year,
Japanese insurance companies paid $50 million in claims involving
plastic-related engine and prop damage.
Drifting in our seas are tens
of thousands of miles of monofilament ghost drift nets and lines.
This same netting ensnares ship props and the necks of sea lions
and turtles. Over the years, my crew have retrieved hundreds
of floating monofilament nets from the sea. All of them contained
the rotting corpses of fish and birds.
In 1998, a well-documented beach
clean-up in Orange County, California, collected 106 million
items, weighing thirteen tons. The debris included preproduction
plastic pellets, foamed plastics, and hard plastics; plastic
constituted 99 percent of the total material collected. The most
abundant item found on the beaches of Orange County was preproduction
plastic pellets, most of which originated from transport losses.
Approximately one quadrillion of these pellets, or 60 billion
pounds, are annually manufactured in the United States alone.
You never hear about these spillages in the newspaper, and there
is not a single plastic pellet spillage response crew anywhere
in the world.
The plastic products that end
up in the sea from consumers constitute less than 30 percent
of the total plastics dumped into the oceans each year. The greater
amount comes from accidental spillage of plastic resin pellets
produced by the petrochemical industry for the purpose of manufacturing
consumer plastic products, or the breakdown of finished products
into Styrofoam nodules or hard plastic particles. Plastic nodules
are lost routinely in both the shipping and manufacturing stages,
spilling from shipboard containers or from trucks onto streets
and into storm drains.
Oil spills occur every day in
our oceans, and major spills occur on average every two weeks
somewhere in the world's marine ecosystem. Although these oil
spills are notorious killers of marine wildlife, their deadly
impact is confined to relatively small areas geographically,
and the impact is reduced with time. The Exxon Valdez spill,
for example, was confined to Alaska's Prince William Sound, and
although the impact on wildlife was felt for many years, the
ecosystem is recovering. Yet this other kind of petrochemical
spill is more invasive and permanent. This type of spill is cumulative.
The spillage is never cleaned up and removed, but accumulates
perpetually.
I don't think that I am exaggerating
when I say that the spillage of plastic resin pellets poses a
significant and unappreciated threat to survival of sea life.
The oceans are becoming plasticized. This threat becomes more
lethal each year as the cumulative amount increases. The impact
of this spillage contributes to more casualties than all of the
world's annual oil spills, yet we know very little about the
problem. In fact, the public does not even recognize plastic
resin pellet spillage as a problem at all.
Plastic pellets also pose an
additional threat. They act as a transport medium for toxic chemicals.
Many of these pellets contain polychlorinated biphenyl's (PCB).
The chemicals were either absorbed from ambient seawater or used
in the manufacture of plasticizers prior to the 1970's. This
transfer of PCB's from ingested pellets into birds was conclusively
proven and documented in the fatty tissues of great shearwaters
(Puffinus gravis). Studies have shown that 75 percent of all
shearwaters examined contained ingested plastic.
Of 312 species of seabirds, some
111 species, or 36 percent, are known to mistakenly ingest plastic.
In Hawaii, sixteen of the eighteen resident seabird species are
plastic ingestors, and 70 percent of this ingestion is of floating
plastic resin pellets. Seabirds in Alaska have been found to
have stomachs entirely filled with indigestible plastic. Penguins
on South African beaches have suffered high chick mortality from
eating plastic regurgitated by the parents, and 90 percent of
blue petrel chicks examined on South Africa's remote Marion Island
had plastic particles in their stomachs.
It is a global problem, and for
seabirds there are no safe places. For most people, the ocean
is a big toilet. The belief is that garbage, sewage, and plastics
are dispersed and taken away.
Unfortunately, nothing is really
ever "taken away"; it is simply perpetually circulated.
The oceans are pulsating with powerful currents, and these currents
keep plastic debris in constant circulation. As a result, debris
travels in what are called "gyres." The gyre concentrates
the garbage in areas where currents meet. For example, one of
the largest of these movements in the Atlantic is called the
central gyre, and it moves in a clockwise circular pattern driven
by the Gulf Stream. The central gyre concentrates heavily in
the northern Sargasso Sea, a place that is also host to numerous
spawning fish species.
The number of floating plastic
pellets found in the Sargasso Sea has been measured in excess
of 3,500 parts per square kilometer. The same ratio of 3,500
parts per square kilometer was found in the waters of the southern
coasts of Africa. This study found that plastic pollution had
increased in South African waters from 1989 to the present by
190 percent.
Birds, turtles, and fish mistake
the tiny nodules for fish eggs. Garbage bags, plastic soda rings,
and Styrofoam particles are regularly eaten by sea turtles. A
floating garbage bag looks like a jellyfish to a turtle. The
plastic clogs the turtles' intestines, robbing the animals of
vital nutrients, and it has been the cause of untold turtle losses
to starvation. All seven of the world's sea turtle species suffer
mortality from both plastic ingestion and plastic entanglement.
One turtle found dead off Hawaii carried over 1,000 pieces of
plastic in its stomach and intestines. And recently, a land-based
turtle rescued in a Florida waterway by Stephen Nordlinger was
unable to submerge due to the amount of Styrofoam trapped in
its body, making it permanently buoyant.
The amount of plastic pellets
present on beaches is astonishingly high. In New Zealand, one
beach was found to contain over 100,000 pellets per square meter.
Thus, it is not so farfetched to suggest that people are in fact
sunbathing on plastic beaches - literally. I have stopped my
ship in mid-ocean and found flip-flops, suntan oil bottles, plastic
Coke bottles, garbage bags, and even large floating industrial
plastic sheets. In each place sampled, we have also found plastic
pellets.
Once, on the bottom of the Mediterranean
off France, I witnessed a scene that appalled me. The entire
bottom was made of plastic. Bottles and plastic bags swaying
with the tide, replacing the sea grasses and algae. It was especially
sad to see one little fish scurry from behind a white plastic
bag to take cover from me in a sunken automobile tire.
Brushing aside another drifting
white bag, I spied a flicker of red on the bottom. What I found
was a plastic face staring up at me with a great big smile and
two enormous plastic ears. It was the decapitated head of a Mickey
Mouse doll.
It's a plastic sea out there.
This article appeared in
the Autumn 2001 issue of Ocean Realm magazine and appears here
by permission.
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
welcomes your support. To learn how to support our conservation
work, please visit: www.seashepherd.org/donate.html.
P.O. Box 2616, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 (USA) Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651
Copyright © 2004 Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society. All rights reserved.
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